Shawmut Design & Construction
Shawmut Design and Construction's CEO, Tom Goemaat has kept the firm on a straight path through rapid growth.

Author: Bill Archambeault

Boston Business Journal April 2002

Building a Firm - Thomas Goemaat’s first taste of the construction industry came about because he was dating a girl in high school whose father ran an excavation company.

Goemaat, now the president and CEO of Shawmut Design and Construction, had always been good at math and had thought about going into engineering before the girl’s father offered him a summer job.

“By the time I started working for him, we’d broken up,” Goemaat said with a laugh. “I was in better graces with him than her.”

Goemaat came back the next three summers, gradually handling more responsibility until he was doing surveying work his last summer.

When he was hired by Boston-based Turner Construction Co. out of college, he started out doing field surveying. Goemaat remembers thinking, “I’ll never have to wear a tie and sit in an office.”

But in 1976, the construction industry was slow, and Turner needed help with estimating, so Goemaat moved into the purchasing department, where he worked until 1988, when he was chosen to run Turner’s special projects division on corporate interiors, a $25 million business within the then-$150 million firm, from 1988 to 1993.

Seventeen years after he began working at Turner, Goemaat was thinking of starting his own company when he met Jim Ansara, the founder and now the chairman of Shawmut. Ansara named him Shawmut’s executive vice president in 1993, and Goemaat is now in charge of Shawmut’s day-to-day operations. He’s grown it from a $75 million company in 1996 to a $340 million company today, with 250 – 300 salaried employees and 75-150 union employees at any given time.

Goemaat credits a stiff dose of reality with helping turn his sights from entrepreneurship to signing on with Ansara at Shawmut. It had been a year since his wife had given birth to triplets, and Goemaat had intended to let his life settle into a more stable routine before launching his own venture. Then reality hit. With his children about a year old, “I realized life wasn’t going to stabilize anytime soon,” said Goemaat, who will turn 48 next month. “Going into business on your own is a seven-day-a-week profession. The window has closed.”

And while Goemaat isn’t running his own firm, he’s placing his imprint on Shawmut. Tom Feeley, managing partner of Feeley & Driscoll, P.C., Shawmut’s CPA firm, said Goemaat has succeeded in growing a staff that approaches projects from the client’s point of view. On a dormitory-renovation project at Boston College, for example, Goemaat said signs were posted reminding workers to “Think like a parent” and not take the students’ health and safety lightly.

“He’s got the ability to grow his company into a billion-dollar company in the next five years or so,” Feeley said.

Goemaat’s occupant-friendly approach has been appreciated at other sites. John Camera, Jr., a senior vice president at Boston Properties, Inc., recalled how impressed people at Goulston & Storrs, P.C. were with a remodeling project Shawmut was doing at the Boston-based law firm’s Atlantic Avenue offices.

“We tried to tell them it was going to be a nightmare to stay in the building” while construction was under way, Camera said. But the project was planned around the tenants. “People would come in the next morning and not realize workers had been in there.”

Camera said that Shawmut’s emphasis on pre-construction planning made the lobby renovation at 265 Franklin Street an “absolute Swiss watch of a lobby” after another firm couldn’t make the numbers work.

Despite the company’s growth under Goemaat, Shawmut has remained focused on three key areas: institutional work, high-end corporate interiors and restaurant/retail. The firm was tempted to cash in on the building boom of the late 1990’s, Goemaat said, but Shawmut choose to concentrate on its specialties.

As a result, even though Shawmut’s corporate work is down 20 percent to 30 percent, its institutional work is up more than 50 percent. And retail, which focuses on high-end retail stores and midlevel, national chain restaurants, is up slightly.

“The ‘90s were a great time in the real estate and construction business,” Goemaat said. “Everything was up. It was very easy to get distracted and chase jobs. What I feel we did very well is stay true. Other firms turned their back on institutions to do sexy development projects.”

The one area Shawmut is doing more work in, he said, is lab space. Not because it’s in such high demand, he said, but because it’s an increasingly important part of the work being done at academic institutions.

Goemaat said he insists that Shawmut hit “a nine or ten” on every project, with a five representing a project that is brought in on time, on budget and at a high quality.

“You have to deliver fives just to play in the big leagues of construction in Boston,” he said. “We’re trying for nines and tens, where a client is raving about Shawmut and wouldn’t even consider another firm.”

Goemaat is credited with building on the culture Ansara created when he started Shawmut in 1982, not recreating it to fit his more laid-back personality.

“He sets the tone for his staff, and they fall into step and know that’s the Shawmut way,” Boston Properties’ Camera said. “There was a culture at Shawmut already. The bones were there already; Tom just put more meat on them.”

Goemaat (who pronounces his name “go-matt”) said he insists on a home/work balance for Shawmut’s employees and himself.

He has “a deal, more or less,” with his family that means he’s rarely away from home more than two nights a week and rarely works weekends. Doing things like coaching his three sons’ baseball team is important for Goemaat, who grew up with a father who spent long hours managing a men’s clothing store in Ridgewood, N.J.

“We would barely see him from Thanksgiving to Christmas,” he said.

After feeling frustrated by some of the large-company trappings at Turner, Goemaat said he’s found a good fit with Ansara and Shawmut.

“Jim and I were, and still are, a good combo, a yin and yang,” Goemaat said. “The company used to really get its energy from Jim for a long time. I’m a little more low key.”

Associates and friends say Goemaat’s cool-under pressure demeanor and his attention to details at the pre-construction planning phase has fueled Shawmut’s recent success.

“(Pre-construction estimating) is where a construction company makes or loses its money. It’s where the table is set,” he said. “You can turn a good estimate into a bad job, but you can’t turn a bad estimate into a good job.”

George Scharfe, president of John a. Penney Co., Inc., a Cambridge-based electrical contractor, remembers one of Shawmut’s first big jobs: building out a dozen floors for Scudder Investments at International Place. There was a dispute of some kind between Penney and Shawmut, Scharfe recalls, so his brother, Alan, Penney’s executive vice president, sat down with Goemaat and quickly hammered things out.

“I remember my brother coming back and saying, ‘He really does know what he’s doing.’ I remember my brother was very impressed with him after that,” Scharfe said. “Tom’s always been a real good egg. In an industry where everybody’s not always forthright, he’s always a straight arrow. He’s a very good guy in a very tough business.”

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